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Pandemic Propels Digitization Progress

COVID-19, with its related State-wide shutdowns, has dramatically increased the need for digitized archival collections. For the Clements Library, reference requests, teaching opportunities, and other services have been limited to what we are able to provide remotely. This demand prompted us to dedicate significantly more staff time to digitizing materials, whether by creating high-resolution digital surrogates for long-term online access or speedier reference snapshots for immediate use. The increased speed with which we have been scanning materials led us to reaffirm and reevaluate our selection process for digitizing archival collections, in order to best serve our teaching activities, remote patrons, and long-term goals. The William L. Clements Library is pleased to report that in these troubling times, its digitization initiatives have amplified and increased, resulting in the scanning of 12 complete archival collections, a modicum of partial collections, and an extraordinary amount of materials for reference purposes.

For the digitization team, the pandemic closure caught us in the midst of a transition. We had just posted the position of digitization technician in January 2020 and completed the interview process a month later. Shortly after Christopher Ridgway accepted the position in early March, the Library closed and everyone shifted to work from home. Fortunately, we had completed the hiring process before a University-wide hiring freeze went into effect, so Chris’ new role with us was secure despite the changing situation. Chris started in April as a remote employee, a real challenge for someone whose work requires hands-on interactions with collections in the Library.

Instead of learning to handle rare items and exploring the Library stacks to become familiar with the collections, Chris spent the summer doing remote training on workflows and technologies, attending webinars and online events related to digitization in cultural institutions, and joining Library staff meetings on Zoom to get to know his new colleagues from a distance. In addition, Chris edited captions for recorded lectures, updated online exhibits, transcribed manuscripts, and designed a logo for our online Bookworm discussion series.

When we were able to re-enter the Library on a limited basis in August, it was wonderful to finally introduce Chris to his workspace and show in person the collections we had been telling him about since April. He quickly picked up the essentials of operating the book scanner and producing scans using our workflow, prepared by his time at home studying the training materials.

Technician adjusts cradle scanner area

Chris Ridgway at long last working hands-on with the Library’s book scanner.

Our building re-entry plan called for one-third occupancy, with each staff member in a dedicated workspace using separate equipment. Focusing on key in-person roles such as conservation, cataloging, reference, and digitization, we agreed that our core tasks for the fall semester were to support remote reference and teaching. With relatively few collections fully digitized and online, most of our reference queries and instruction sessions would require new images, so ramping up digitization became a central part of the plan. Cheney J. Schopieray (Curator of Manuscripts) and Emiko Hastings (Curator of Books) both chose to join the first phase of staff returning to the Library in order to restart the digitization program and act as additional technicians during the first phase. We moved the scanners into separate rooms so that each person could have a dedicated space with their own queue of materials to scan.

The Child Toilers of Boston Streets by Emma E. Brown (Boston, 1878) was included in a selection of Clements Library book material on the theme of 19th-century social reforms recently scanned for the HathiTrust Digital Library. A fictional account of the social conditions of child laborers, it ties in with progressive themes in our manuscript collections, and as a more obscure edition, had not yet been made available through HathiTrust.

With no new scans of material produced since December and many researchers who had to postpone their Library visits, we returned to a pent-up demand for digital access. We opted to split the requests into two queues, one for the reference team to answer with quick, low-resolution photographs and the other for the digitization team to fulfill with high-resolution scans suitable for inclusion in an online collection. In this way, we could more speedily address immediate needs, while balancing the long-term goal to sustainably grow our digital collections for enhanced remote access. Staff working from home completed the process by compiling PDFs for users, creating cover sheets and metadata, and responding to the email reference queue.

The high-resolution scanning workflow is a time-consuming process. It involves slower scanning speeds and the careful production of item-level metadata to help organize the images and facilitate searching and retrieval of items in the collection. Once the images and metadata are complete, the University of Michigan Library’s Digital Content & Collections (DCC) department hosts and maintains the collection, a service for which the Clements Library is deeply grateful.

The competing priorities of high-resolution scans versus low-resolution snapshots brings to mind the question of how the Library decides on which archival collections to assign to which workflow. For which collections do we create high-resolution digital surrogates? After all, the time required to digitize one collection is time we are not spending on another. Holding almost 2,800 manuscripts collections, the Clements Library must determine its digitization priorities carefully. When the Library began to scan archival materials in 2019, we selected collections based on a variety of criteria, with a particular eye toward testing the format and display of the digital versions. The selections therefore included examples of single and multi-series collections, oversize manuscripts, and mixtures of bound and loose-leaf items. Other necessary factors included the condition of the materials, the anticipated use of the collection, and a desire to make lesser-known items of importance available in order to increase their use. The German Auxiliaries Muster Rolls and the Samuel Latham Mitchill Papers we knew had immediate audiences waiting for them. The Humphry and Moses Marshall Papers and the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society Papers are multi-series collections with a selection of loose pages, bound items, and oversize materials. We also selected items that might serve as examples of particular subject matter, anticipating future grant proposals to digitize much larger collections pertaining to similar topics. We digitized, for example, the Elizabeth Camp Journals, thinking of potential funding opportunities to scan our individual women’s diaries, and the Henry James Family Correspondence, considering a future project to digitize our Civil War collections.

Two mast ship and water, framed, all made of colorful stamps

With the Avenir Foundation Reading Room closed, reference staff re-doubled their efforts to provide quick, reference-quality images to researchers unable to wait for the library to re-open, and not in need of the high-resolution images provided by the scanning team. At the request of a patron, PDF images were created of the Harry A. Simmons sketchbook including this depiction of a ship, composed entirely of mailing stamps. Simmons (b. ca. 1826) served in the Union Navy during the Civil War.

 

The COVID-19 workplace introduced additional factors for consideration, based on immediate needs associated with reference queries and teaching. The criteria is currently as follows:

• Can the materials be scanned safely in their current state?
• Will digitization reduce wear on fragile materials?
• Do any legal reasons exist preventing the distribution of the digital collection?
• Are the materials organized and have they been cataloged?
• Will the digitized materials serve current reference and fellowship needs?
• Will the digitized materials be used in forthcoming classes or presentations?
• Does the scanning of the collection serve larger digitization goals of the Library?
• Would the scanning of the collection help highlight items related to historically underrepresented persons?
• Does the collection have a broad audience or high public interest?
• How large is the collection and how long will it take to digitize?
• Do we have the funds and resources to digitize the collection?

 

Shown here scanning a manuscript collection, Samantha Hill, Joyce Bonk Fellow, contributes to the Clements’ online efforts by learning digitization methods and workflows, and participating in the creation of new digital collections and web-based resources.

Over the past nine months, we have created high-resolution scans of the following collections and they are either online or awaiting online deployment:

Maria M. Churchill Journals, 1845-1848. Daily journal entries providing insights into the emotional and intellectual life of a middle-class woman in the mid-1800s.

Loftus Cliffe Papers, 1769-1784. Personal letters largely dating from Cliffe’s service in the British Army during the American Revolution.

Gardner Family Papers, 1776-1789. Documentation of the management of Joseph Gardner’s Jamaica plantation.

Great Britain Indian Department Collection, 1753-1795. Documents, letters, and other manuscripts relating to interactions between government and military officials, Native Americans, and American residents.

William Howe Orderly Book, 1776-1778. Copies of orders for a brigade under British Commander-in-Chief Sir William Howe.

Jacob Aemilius Irving Letter Books, 1809-1816. Letters of a Jamaican sugar planter during the years following the cessation of the British slave trade.

King Family Papers, 1844-1901. Documenting the business activities of the King brothers, three of whom worked as traders with Russell & Company in China in the mid-19th century, and the subsequent institutionalization of William King.

Richard Pohrt Jr. Collection of Native American Photography, ca. 1855-1940. Approximately 1,420 photographs pertaining to Native American history from the 1850s into the 1920s.

James Sterling Letter Book, 1761-1765. Outgoing letters of James Sterling, a fur trader at Fort Detroit.

United Sons of Salem Benevolent Society Minute Book, 1839-1867. Business proceedings of a mid-19th-century African American organization, a hybrid of an insurance agency and charitable operation.

Weld-Grimké Family Papers: Diaries, 1828-1836. Diaries of abolitionists and women’s rights activists Sarah Moore Grimké and Angelina Emily Grimké.

Charles Winstone Letter Book, 1777-1786. Business correspondence of Winstone, attorney general and planter in Dominica during and after the American Revolution.

Handwritten letter with color target for scanning

The pandemic has allowed the Clements Library to accumulate a backlog of digitized collections waiting to go online. The Great Britain Indian Department Collection is an important body of documents, letters, and manuscripts relating to interactions between government and military officials, Native Americans, and American residents from 1753 to 1795. This manuscript documentation of a council meeting, May 18, 1785, contains eloquent speeches by Lenape/Delaware Chief Captain Wolf and Shawanese Chief Kekewepelethy (“Captain Johnny”) demanding that the Americans prevent Virginians from encroaching on lands west of the Ohio River in accordance with treaties.

While the pandemic temporarily disrupted our digitization process, it also pushed us to increase the capacity and efficiency of our scanning program. Previously, we had relied upon physical access in the reading room as the primary means by which researchers could interact with the collections, with digitization something to be done in addition as time and other projects allowed. With in-person access now strictly limited, we have become more flexible and creative in finding ways to make materials available to researchers across the world, whether through quick reference snapshots, high-resolution scans, or even digitizing old microfilm reels. Many of these efforts will benefit researchers long after the pandemic is over, as we continue to improve our online presence and make collections more widely available outside the confines of the Library building.

Emiko Hastings
Curator of Books and Digital Projects Librarian

Cheney J. Schopieray
Curator of Manuscripts